The city traffic police will begin a campaign from Monday to bring lane discipline among city’s road users. The traffic police say that cutting lanes and driving on wrong lanes are the prime reasons behind congestion and accidents in the city. If everyone sticks to their lanes, the movement of traffic can be improved in the city, they feel.
The police will start the campaign from M.G. Road and will cover other areas of the city over a period of time. “The traffic police have painted 10 junctions in the city which clearly indicate where road users should stop, where to allow pedestrians to cross and where to overtake, etc. Over the next few days, we will mark more traffic junctions and roads,” said M.A. Saleem, Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic).
The police will run the pilot project on Old Airport Road and will remove several bottlenecks on the stretch. “We are planning to close down the U-turn in front of Manipal Hospital. We realised that traffic piled up at this junction as vehicles waited to get inside the hospital,” Mr Saleem said. The BBMP too has its own plans to reduce congestion at this point and is drawing up a blueprint to build an underpass to the hospital. The project is expected to be on public private partnership model, a BBMP official said.
“There have been large-scale infrastructure projects going on in the city. Major roads have been dug up for Metro and other works. Once works are completed along one stretch, we will take up painting of roads,” he said. Traffic experts cautioned that unless the traffic police and BBMP marked the lanes clearly, it was not fair to levy fines on commuters. “The traffic police already book cases for crossing yellow lanes, while they are not visible in most parts of the city,” a traffic expert said.